Today, multimedia content can be recorded, displayed, and accessed on a wide variety of platforms including mobile computing devices, such as laptops, tablet computers, smart phones, etc. In general, multimedia may comprise a combination of text, audio, images, animation, video, or interactive content.
Unfortunately, it remains difficult to encode and synchronize text that is associated with a multimedia file. For example, the judicial system requires production and review of a substantial amount of information including audio and visual evidence, document production and review of written and electronically generated information, and testimony of various involved parties. Testimony is understood to be a process by which an attorney asks oral questions of a witness and the witness provides answers under oath. A word-for-word record of the questions asked and the answers given is called the testimony transcript. Testimony is normally taken and recorded during a deposition or a trial. During a trial or deposition, testimony is recorded by a court reporter using a special typewriter-like device normally referred to as a stenograph machine. The output of the stenograph machine is a long paper tape of printed phonetic characters capturing, in a form of short hand, the word-for-word record of the testimony. The court reporter uses the paper tape to create a text translation of the tape or text data. This text data is created using a typewriter or a word processor. The text data is referred to as a transcript of the testimony and is historically created “off-line” from the actual testimony.
During the discovery and research phase of litigation, the attorney will search through testimony for key statements made by a witness. The attorney uses software tools for searching and annotating the ASCII testimony or text data.
A shortcoming of some transcript management utilities is that they operate on a full version of Microsoft Windows operating system, which places large demands on processor speed and RAM memory. As a result, the full Microsoft Windows operating system is unsuitable for mobile computing devices, and they cannot run transcript management utilities. The result is that there has been no transcript management utility for display of smoothly scrolling, synchronized text and multimedia for use on a mobile computing device, where the user may perform a gesture on the text to cause the multimedia to jump to a desired location and begin playback.